Outercurve, UC Berkeley, Microsoft Putting Big History In Cloud

The Outercurve Foundation, in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, Moscow State University and Microsoft Research, has accepted the ChronoZoom project, now available in version 2, into its Research Accelerators Gallery.

The project, developed to help students, educators, researchers and academics understand historical themes among scientific and humanistic disciplines, was contributed to the foundation by project leader Roland Saekow and project contributors from Microsoft Research, UC Berkeley and Moscow State University.

ChronoZoom, a cloud-based, HTML5 software tool, makes time relationships between different studies of history clear and vivid. In the process, it provides a framework for exploring related electronic resources and serves as a “master timeline”, tying together various specialized timelines and electronic resources.

ChronoZoom aspires to bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences to bring together and unify all knowledge of the past using the story line of Big History to make it easy to understand. ChronoZoom allows users to browse historical knowledge, rather than digging it out piece by piece, by linking relevant online resources to fixed time scales in an organized and logical manner.

Roland Saekow (Community Project Lead, ChronoZoom, University of California, Berkeley): Up until now, it’s been very difficult to understand the vastly different timescales of Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity. With ChronoZoom’s unique zoom capability, we can seamlessly zoom from billions of years, down to a single day right in a standard web browser.

The Outercurve Foundation is a non-profit foundation providing software IP management and project development governance.